


what light we catch

by The_Side



Category: Arthurian Mythology & Related Fandoms, Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Age Changes, Alternate Universe - Canon, Arthur Knows About Merlin's Magic (Merlin), Arthurian, Asexual Merlin (Merlin), English Folklore - Freeform, F/M, Gen, Good Morgana (Merlin), Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 09:36:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21336088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Side/pseuds/The_Side
Summary: Uther's list of mistakes could span the length of Briton three times over, but fostering his children in houses of other petty kings has to be one of the worst. Years later, they both return, strangers to the world and each other, and must contend with attempted murder, treasonous secrets, and teenage hormones.
Relationships: Gwen & Merlin & Morgana & Arthur Pendragon, Gwen/Lancelot (Merlin), Merlin & Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), Morgana/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	what light we catch

**Author's Note:**

> This combines the show (mostly the show, in later chapters), Arthurian legend, mythology/folklore from around the UK, other takes on Merlin or Arthur's childhoods (most notably, the Merlin Series), and as much actual history as I could cram in without ruining the source material. Ages don't match up to the show because of this.
> 
> My description was terrible.

Merlin’s father falls to fever not a year after his victory at the fields of Aqua Saulis, so the serving woman Hunith takes him by the hand and flees in the night to the cluster of households tenanted to Caerfyrddin.

“You are Myrddin,” she tells him in Cymraeg when they stop to change horses just over the border of Ponwys. Her hands grip his upper arms, her fingers rough with calluses, hard as her gaze, hard enough to bruise. She says, “ _ Myrddin. _ Forget Ambrosius.” 

To forget Ambrosius is to forget his parents and forget himself, so he thinks,  _ Emrys, then _ , and tucks the name away until the time he will need it again.

From the croft Hunith claims as theirs—the croft that was her father’s, once, and her brother’s still—Merlin can just see the ramparts of his grandfather’s castle peaking above the Midsummer greenery that blankets the slopes of Bryn Myrddin, where he spent his early childhood and for which his mother named him. His grandfather is a breinn of Brycheiniog and his mother was his only daughter, who refused to name the father of her bastard son until she whispered it in his ear while she lay dying from a fever of her own. Merlin had barely seen five years at the time of her death, and knew nothing of the magic that ruled them both, and so still can’t say how or when she sent word to Brittany, where Aurelius Ambrosius waited in exile. It wasn’t long later that Merlin woke to a hand over his mouth and the sight of the hound beside him dead. 

He hadn’t regretted leaving. His grandfather hated him and his mother had always feared too much for his safety to be truly kind. Even then, the kindest was Hunith, his mother’s maidservant, who stole away with him that night and now has stolen away with him again.

With a quiver to her voice, she introduces him to her brother, the eldest of her siblings, a stout man called Celyn, who’s half-starved and half-fit from his days tilling the earth. “This is my son,” she says. “His name is Myrddin.” 

For a long moment, Celyn of Caerfyrddin says nothing, but his eyes rove over them both. Hunith and Merlin hold no physical similarities but their pale eyes, she with her bark brown hair, her skin weathered from childhood and spine rounded from years of hard work while he, though only eleven, is nearly her height already. It’s a trait he inherited from his father, along with his black hair and a body too wiry to have ever known a gwas’ work. He stays quiet. Though his Welsh is impeccable, he still spent the last five years running across Briton and Cornwall with Camelot as his home, and his accent reflects it.

Eventually, Celyn looks above him and focuses on his sister. “A bastard?” he says, and his mouth creases into a frown. “Where’s the father?”

“Where do you think?” Hunith answers, too snappish to be polite. “Dead.”

Celyn’s wife is also dead, but he has one son left alive, they learn. A boy called Will three years Merlin’s senior. Will, Celyn makes clear, is legitimate.

Though Hunith’s grip tightens, Merlin remains unfazed. His father may have acknowledged him, but he’s been a bastard his entire life. Let her and his father’s closer, personal allies fear his uncle Uther’s paranoia over the claim he, even as an adult, would never pursue. Let others be offended on his behalf. He’s too weary from travel and grief to care.

After another pause, Celyn says, “Tomorrow we start planting our oats. And the ewes will be lambing soon. Tonight you’ll sleep in front of the hearth. We can decide what to do about you in the morning.”

“Thank—” Hunith begins, but her brother stops her with a cutting look and reminder that they can’t stay if they don’t work for their keep. “We will,” she says. Says it fervently. Merlin’s eyes droop. “Thank you.”

That night, they sleep at the soot-darkened mouth of the croft’s hearth, draped in their travelling cloaks with Hunith’s arms tucked around Merlin, as though he really were hers. That night, he dreams he’s back in the cavern beneath Vortigern’s cursed fortress where he prophesied the king’s destruction, alone but for the flame on his palm and a bear cub at his feet as the stone roof collapses overhead.

In the week before the High King falls to fast fever, his brother Uther takes Duke Gorlois’ wife Ygraine on the marriage bed in Tintagel through the help of a magic guise. It’s sorceress Nimueh and cunning man Gaius who dually organise the deception, though the boy Merlin’s hollow-voiced prophecy is what spawns the decision. “Your son will come to be Briton’s greatest king,” he declared in one of their rare moments alone. “His name will live on for a thousand years and through his, so will yours.” 

Perhaps it should be demeaning, the idea that Uther’s legacy will continue through his son’s, but when he pressed the boy on who the mother should be and received the answer Ygraine—well, that was enough. Ygraine of Dumnonia could be a Sǣl come to walk the human earth, and Uther, damning the consequences, had been attempting to gain her affections since she first entered Court.

The Duke discovers them together, tangled on the sheets as man and wife. Ygraine screams. He rages, curses, threatens murder and war, and finally settles for an annullment if Uther surrenders something as precious as a wife in fair trade.

“In the name of every god, Uther,” his brother says when he returns to Camelot. Already, Ambrose shakes from the effort of living, his face flushed the same colour as the dragon on the tapestry behind him, “you are a damned fool.”

“I love her,” Uther says, but it sounds weak even to him, despite the truth of it. Merlin, caught between the two of them before he could scramble free from the bedchamber, clings to a high-backed chair and stares. But for his eyes and pallor, he is his father in miniature. 

“Then let her be,” Ambrose says, tone a knife twist between Uther’s ribs, before dismissing him in favour of continuing his conversation with his  _ bastard son. _

Four days later, Ambrose is dead and the boy disappears. Two days after that, Uther surrenders his own bastard Morgana into Gorlois’ arms, as he promised when he still seated nude on the edge of Ygraine’s bed, for he loves the girl as dearly as he would if she were a legitimate daughter, even if he still had yet to acknowledge her. A week passes before the Dragonlord of the Wood crowns him High King in the sight of every petty king and lesser lord, and another three before he weds his bride before them all. Gorlois and the other Cornish lords watch the affair with unveiled hatred. Already they’ve spread rumors of deception and ravishment, though there was never a time when Ygraine was unaware he was not her husband. Ambrose’s staunches allies are the ones to most strongly believe the tales the Cornish propagate, and it’s those men who Uther suspects spirited his nephew away.

In the months that follow, he keeps the men of the Southern Kingdoms close, but confides in them little, gravitating his trust instead towards those in the North, with his daughter Morgause’s husband, King Lot of Lothian, as his closest friend and ally. Scouts search for Merlin to no avail, but Uther hadn’t expected any more than that; at just ten years, the boy put even Nimueh to shame. He could be in Brittany, or Rome, or further still. At least, Uther thinks, now that he’s already prophesied the reign of the rightful heir, he isn’t likely to return.

Meanwhile, Ygraine’s belly swells. 

“Hello, Arthur,” she whispers in her seventh month, when she’s heavy with child and they’ve finally come to a decision on the boy’s name. Her white, thin nightclothes do little to hide the misshapen contours of her pregnant body. “We can’t wait to meet you.”

She smiles at Uther then, fleeting and easy, and squeezes his hand. In the bedchamber’s flickering candlelight, her golden hair glows. As ever, she is a beam of leftover sunlight in the darkness, a balm against the night. He rubs a circle across her stomach and feels the child move.

Traditionally, a king should hope his son favours his features, but Uther prays nonetheless that it’s Ygraine who their son will resemble most.

In the eighth month, Nimueh comes to him after he adjourned yet another court session addressing the imminent Saxon invasion, and says, “I saw the Prince’s death at his birth.”

Uther’s heart leaps to his throat. “Save him,” he says. It’s not a plea, but an order. The sorceress’ flat, vibrant eyes meet his own without demure, and she swears to him that she will, her ageless face impassive. She gathers darkness the way his wife gathers light, the shadows that the torches cast clustering in her dark hair and the outline of her face.

As she promised, Arthur lives. Instead, it’s Ygraine who, shrieking from pain, dies after two days on the birthing bed.  _ A life for a life _ , Nimueh says, as though that makes the murder of his wife justifiable _ . _

Within the same time it took his brother to die, he declares magic a crime punishable by pain of death, and spirits his son away to Lot’s care in Lothian at the Scottish border.  _ Until it comes time to declare him as my heir _ , he writes to his friend.  _ Keep him safe.  _

Lot doesn’t answer him, as he requests. It’s a long while before Uther considers the matter of his son again.

Two days ride west, in the shadow of another great castle, a boy called Myrddin’s eyes glow yellow and a dying lamb becomes hale again beneath his touch.

“You have magic?” says Will, his eyes wide beneath the brim of his hat. He has a crooked nose and a harvest tan and eyes as light as his aunt’s. 

“Yes,” Merlin says, and frowns. The sun’s burned him red across his cheeks, giving him a look of perpetual humiliation. “You won’t tell your father, will you?”

Shaking his head, his supposed cousin says, “I won’t be telling a soul. I swear on my life.”

They shake hands then, and claim each other friends.

In the ninth year of High King Uther’s reign, the Saxons attack in a great throng from their place behind Ambrosius’ Wall, so Lot takes his men and his sons and rides south. Emrys, the scrawny serving boy of no name who could never hope to join the war band, steals an old broodmare from the stables (with the stablehand Ralph’s permission) and rides into the wood.

Emrys doesn’t know much about riding, but Blom is a gentle enough horse of small stature, and far too old to ever stray from the familiar path beside the water. “We won’t go too far,” he says, patting her neck as he knocks her sides. He clicks his tongue, convincing her to manage a slow trot, and continues, “I heard Seonaid mention there’s a place down here where you can find the Queen of Elphame’s son.”

Seonaid is another household servant, a relatively new addition six years older than he with the traditional autumn-coloured hair of her people. Principally, she's a chambermaid, whose duties included disposing of waste and scrubbing the floors, and, since the Lady Morgause took her infant son and left, warming King Lot’s bed. Though Emrys has no confirmation, he firmly believes Seonaid is the only one who hates the king as much as he does. 

Or perhaps not. Another recent change is that, like King Lot and his two eldest sons, she took to favouring the Christian God over the others who rule this land.

So the news about the Queen of Elphame’s son came as some surprise and must be true, he assumed, if she dared speak what she considered blasphemy. Emrys fidgets on his horse, impatient, but watches for rain clouds or bandits. Both are always possibility; hardly a day passes without a storm, and criminals of all creed stalk between the ashes and wych elms, following the stream as he does. Even at eight, he knows that much.

He left the castle grounds just past sunrise. Some time later, the trees finally give way to an enclosed drop, which the stream tumbles down into from a narrow waterfall. A breeze shakes the thick summer canopy above him, the branches rattling dissonantly. He slides from the chestnut’s back and ties her bridle to thin trunk of a birch sapling. The air around him is thick from the promise of afternoon rain, swallowing him in its damp heat. His pale hair sticks to his forehead, and he pushes it, frustrated, away from his eyes. The sun, high and uncovered in the unobscured blue sky, wraps him in light. If there are criminals around him, then he has no hope of camouflage. 

Well, he hadn’t thought of that, so it’s too late to worry for it now. He knots the fabric holding up his pants tighter around his waist, tucking in his shirt, and heads to the cliff’s edge. 

Should this work, he may never have to return to his master again.

With surer footing than any serving boy deserves (in Ralph’s words), he shimmies down the uneven limestone and drops with a  _ crunch _ to the slick pebbles below. The stream’s formed a shallow, reflective pool that curls around the gully, stinking of something rotten. Trees grow directly from the rocks, hanging above the drop with their roots crawling across like a spider’s legs. A rook crows above him, followed by a dozen more, and lastly by a magpie’s call.

The back of his neck prickles and he thinks,  _ There’s someone watching me. _

He whirls on his heel. There, at the side of the waterfall, stands a man about Lord Gareth’s age, thin as any marsh reed with black hair bracketing an equally thin face. “Hello,” he says after the length of a heartbeat. He has an accent that, after a moment, Emrys identifies as Welsh. In his hands he holds a woven basket filled with water. “Who are you?”

“My name is Emrys,” he says, mustering more bravery than he feels. The man’s eyes, blue as his own, widen so they seem to swallow his face. “I’m here in search of the Queen of Elpame’s son.”

“Oh,” the man says, and his brow creases. “I’m sorry. I think you mean me, Emrys.” He says the name hesitantly, as though tasting it. Bewildered, Emrys begins to ask for clarification, but the man continues, “I’m not the Queen of Elpame’s son. I only care for her neglected shrine. My name is Myrddin.”

Hope leaves Emrys in a rush, and the pressure of tears builds against his eyes, treacherous. He swallows thickly and says, "But you guard her shrine. Do you still give help?”

Myrddin lays the basket to the ground and inches closer. "If help is needed," he answers. "Why did you come for it?"

As his gaze shoots to his feet, Emrys says, "I'm servant in King Lot's household. He is...unkind."

"Unkind."

Emrys' nod is little more than a jerk of his head. The midges swarm them, attacking his neck and behind his ears. In the morning, he will wake on itchy, straw-filled mattress with itchy bumps on his skin, all for  _ nothing. _

With an ungainly movement, the Welsh shrine keeper lowers himself to his knees. "How did you come to be in the King's service?" he asks. 

"My mother was their servant first," he says, and glances at Myrddin quickly before returning his gaze to the white pebbled ground. That's what the Lady Morgause told him. She never told him who his father was, which is reason enough for him to form his own ideas. 

Thankfully, Myrddin doesn't ask. 

"I can't remove you from their service," he says. Emrys raises his eyes once again, prepared to protest, but Myrddin raises his hand for his silence. It’s bony, and his littlest finger isn’t straight. “It's no secret that I've come to replace the last holy man to tend the shrine. It wouldn't be long before they found your trail, and so found you, and you would be the worse for it. But,” he adds, “I can offer you a place here whenever you wish to come. This is a sanctuary for anyone, regardless of what gods or God they worship.”

“They won't be gone long,” Emrys says. His insides are cold despite the heat, which shimmers off the pool. It doesn’t seem worth it to mention that the king’s family never saw him baptised. “I can’t come back.”

"If you want to come, then you will come," Myrddin says, "and you'll do so safely. That I can give you."

"How?"

The smile comes as a surprise, quick and easy, creasing the corners of the man's eyes with early laugh lines. "That," he says, "is not a worry for you, Emrys. Are you hungry?"

"Yes," Emrys says, though he hadn't realised it until now. "I mean—thank you."

Myrddin leads him to a hidden cave’s mouth, where candlelight glows from within its darkened depths, and serves him freshly made oatcakes with a sweet paste made from blackberries. As he eats himself to unfamiliar fullness, the shrine keeper asks him questions not about where he comes from or how he lives but what he  _ wants. _ There’s a lot that Emrys wants—a true father, for one, and a mother as well, not to mention a home. A croft would do. Even a hovel. Even a cave. Even Elfland.

But this all keeps to himself. “I want to learn how to ride a proper horse,” he says instead, “and to fight with a real sword.”

“Would you like to read?” 

Emrys blinks, blank in his surprise. Learning how to wield a blade is more realistic for a maidservant’s son than learning to read. Myrddin must be joking, he thinks, but the man only watches him with his pale eyes, patient, expectant. Tentatively, Emrys nods.

So he learns to read Latin.

Quick enough, he discovers Myrddin is a sorcerer, as only magic could protect Emrys so completely each time he sneaks away. “I won’t tell anyone,” he says when he admits what he knows, and his friend’s already ashen face drains of what little colour it has. The paleness is a stark contrast to the darkness of the cave. “I promise.”

“For the sake of your own safety,” he says, laying a hand on Emrys’ shoulder, “never allow  _ anyone _ to know you have even the slightest inkling of magic or what it can do.”

“I won’t,” he says again, frowning. “I’ve not told anyone that I come here. I won’t start doing any telling now.”

Some tension leaves Myrddin’s shoulders, and he lowers his head. Rain patters onto the pool beyond the cave’s mouth, so the echo of their voices is louder than usual. “I know,” he says and, after a short pause, raises his head again and asks, “Would you like to learn Cymraeg?”

“After can you teach me to ride a horse?”

“Yes,” he says, but the whole word is one long sigh.

It’s been a year now since Emrys discovered Myrddin at the stream’s mouth, and in that time he’s learned to read, and better his Pictish and Scoti. “Do you know  _ every _ language?” he’d asked when the man claimed they should move to the latter, and, cheeks blooming red, he had answered, “Only those on this isle. And Frankish.”

The King’s Pictish and Cymraeg are dismal and his Frankish nonexistent; his sons, to Emrys’ knowledge, have no ability to speak any of them at all. For that alone, if nothing else, he’s willing to accept any teachings Emrys can offer. It’s a nice thought, being better than princes and kings.

Still. To ride would be nicer. 

At ten and three quarters, Emrys’ Cymraeg is good enough, or so Myrddin says. They speak it as though it's their own secret language, as though they aren’t already so wholly alone. There’s a thrill in that, at having something that’s  _ his _ —at the castle, the King berates him in a way he berates no other servant, his criticism complete with cuffs to the head or barked orders for more chores. Lord Agravaine and Lord Gareth are just as bad, though at least Lord Gaheris is recently wed and no longer a member of the household (but, unfortunately, neither is Gwaine, who smartly followed the example of his father’s wife and ran during the High King’s last campaign). Lately, Seonaid has taken to preaching to the ‘heathen’ staff the virtues of the Christian God. Ralph is gone, banished after the death of a healthy brood mare and her foal last birthing season. Falloch, the newest cook, is shrew who can’t make a proper stew and won’t sneak Emrys even scraps.

He knows better than to ask where Myrddin procures the young horse, a beautiful buckskin with her golden coat so fine that in the autumn sunlight, she appears milk white. “Where’s the saddle?” he says instead, hand resting on her neck. The air’s sweet from decomposing leaves and far off hearth fire. They stand above the shrine’s home, both in shabby, threadbare clothes and mud staining their feet. That same sunlight that pales the filly’s colour dapples in his yellow hair, transforming him into what might have been a beacon for any woodland traveller, where it not for the magic’s protection. 

With a honeyed-slick grin, Myrddin tucks his hands into his pockets, rocks back on his heels, and says, “The mare was a difficult find. You never asked for more.”

Emrys drops his hand and looks from left to right, then back to his friend, as if expecting it to appear at his feet. “How am I supposed to ride without one?”

“The hill people of Snowdon ride bareback.”

“But that’s not me!”

Myrddin laughs, the sound high and clear. Though Emrys has tried to wheedle him about it more than once, he has yet to learn where in Wales he was born. He doesn’t look particularly Welsh, or at least how Emrys imagined a Welshman to look before they met; despite his eyes and his skin, his height and his hair mark him more as someone with Roman blood, like the High King himself. Not like Emrys. The Lady Morgause looked at him once when he was so young he hardly remembers, crinkled her nose, and said, “He looks so  _ Cornish. _ ”

Presumably, she had said this to King Lot.

“Can’t you just conjure one?” he asks, and doesn’t care that it comes out as a whine. 

“No,” Myrddin says, which is likely a lie, and adds, “Can the  _ King’s  _ sons ride a horse’s bare back?”

Emrys’ next protest dies before it forms, and he doesn’t argue again.

Within the year, he’s a better rider than Myrddin, who confines himself to a far more gentle mare than Emrys’ Rhiannon. He begins learning Frankish, at his own request. Myrddin transforms two green branches into practice blades and, though he admits his skill is meagre, teaches Emrys what he learned from his uncle and cousin. 

It’s the first time he mentions his past willingly. Grasping the opportunity, Emrys asks, “Where are they now?”

“My uncle died not long before I came north,” Myrddin answers, and passes him a cup filled with the stream’s clear water. Despite the chill of the early December night, practice leaves him overheated and desperate for the offered drink. Today marks their fifth lesson, which is already going poorly, since Emrys’ head hasn’t stopped ringing since the day before. King Lot is gone on yet another campaign against the Saxons, but Lord Agravaine remains, minding the estate to avoid interruptions in his studies of anti-witchcraft legislation. His friend goes on, “My cousin is still with my mother in the village. She could never work the land alone.”

Even after three and a half years, the  _ village _ is the most he’ll say. Frowning, Emrys passes back the cup and says, “What about about your father?”

“He died of fever when I a bit younger than you.”

“How old  _ are _ you?”

Above them, the bare branches rub together, toneless. Myrddin is quiet for so long that Emrys’ stomach ties in a knot from fear that he breached some unspoken rule. Finally, though, his friend says, “Twenty this Beltane.”

That’s about what he expected, but the anxious knot fails to leave. He does look nineteen, or perhaps even younger, and yet it feels like a lie.

Emrys slips back onto castle grounds just before sunrise and finds it awash with wakeful chaos. Within minutes of entering the servant’s door, he overhears Seonaid and the younger chambermaid discussing  _ the King’s arrival.  _ “Just a quarter hour’s ride down the road, m’lord said,” Seonaid is saying. Her cheeks are flushed and eyes glassy, and one hand rests limpy over her belly. It’s been years since he stopped believing they had a bond of similar hate. With a yawn, she says, “Emrys best have the decency to show before Himself is here. He won’t be pleased to find the boy missing.”

“He does go running off an awful lot,” Kinna says, but absently, as she knocks the bones into the largest pot, which will simmer now til Cook is ready for the evening’s autumn stew. The wee hours’ moonlight coming through the high window hides the blotchy pockmarks on her face. “Do you think he has a lady?”

Seonaid snorts. “I would say no, for his age, if he weren’t a pagan.”

Still hidden behind the half-opened door, Emrys stands, still as one of the King’s statues, and hardly hears Kinna says, “ _ I’m _ a pagan,” over the rushing in his ears. Then he breathes deeply, steeling himself, and goes to push through.

He doesn’t manage it. Before the hinges can do more than creak, a hand wraps around his upper arm, the long, familiar fingers binding him in bruising vice, and then Lord Agravaine yanks him away so hard he nearly tumbles. “You’re needed, boy,” he says, his thin mouth curling. “Start the fire in the Hall. We’ll discuss your nightly escapade later.”

Myrddin’s magic has never failed before, but the castle has also hasn’t been in such disarray since the Lady Morgause left. Something more must be happening than the King’s return. With a stuttered, “Yes, M’Lord,” he untangles himself from Lord Agravaine’s grasp, and runs for the Hall.

Though his hands shake, he soon has the hearthfire roaring, chasing away the draft and drawing curtains of opaque fog across the many narrow windows. The steam is nearly unbearable, but will be preferable to the draft that drifts like some unseen haunting about room each season. He means to sneak away before the King and his party enter, but within moments, the tall oak doors open with a resounding  _ bang _ and he strodes inside, only his sons and closest servants behind him, their fur cloaks all dripping from melted frost.

“All because of a sorcerer's curse,” he’s saying, stripping his away from his shoulders to toss at his manservant. Satisfaction drips from him as surely as the frost. Despite years of campaigns and diligent practice in the training pits, age and drink have given his body the same shape as his mistress’, though three times the size. His beard, straggly as a rabid hound’s fur, has a patch torn off on his cheekbone, exposing a scabbed sword wound.

“He’ll want to declare—” Lord Gaheris starts, nearly tripping over himself in an effort to prove his intelligence to the King, as always, but a sharp, sideways look in his direction silences what else he meant to say.

The Hall has two ways in or out: the main door, and the servants’ door. Unfortunately, from where Emrys stands, neither are accessible. As King Lot orders the servants to leave them, he slinks back into the shadowed blindspot the hearth’s dancing firelight creates beside it. The hiding place stays effective long enough for him to hear the King say, “With the unrest in the north, it won’t be difficult to convince Uther—”

“ _ You _ .”

It’s Lord Agravaine who notices Emrys first, because it’s  _ always  _ Lord Agravain. Unthinking, Emrys scrambles out from the shadows towards the servants’ door on the dias, his heart running faster than his feet. Before he’s even halfway there, Lord Gareth’s arm snags him about the waist, wrenching him back with more force than his brother’s earlier tug, until he has Emrys slotted flat against his chest. The knife’s edge is sharp and cold against his neck.

“Should we do it?” his captor asks, casually, as the others step closer, bearing down. 

Emrys quivers. “I didn’t hear nothing,” he says, slipping automatically into his “low” speech, the only he still uses in these walls, though Myrddin taught him to be better. 

“We’ll wait for the messenger,” King Lot answers, ignoring him. Emrys’ head spins. “No point in losing a perfectly good servant if the curse is as quick as his brother’s fever. But lock him in some spare room for now. We’ll know in a few days.”

Lord Gareth’s huffs, his breath shifting through Emrys’ hair. “Mother  _ was _ certain her sister dead? We know that to be true?”

“If Mother said it was true, then it was the truth,” Lord Agravaine says. “Her witch blood had some worth.”

“And she prophesied that it would be of our blood that Uther Pendragon’s line will end.” As the King folds his arms across his chest, he glances down to Emrys, scrutinising his narrow body, his Cornish colouring, his soot-smudged face. “You’ll all testify that we saw to it that your cousin was treated well. That we kept suspicion away from him. It’s just simple poor luck that he’s one of the many from my household to die in the Scoti attack.”

“But Mother—”

“Mother is gone,” Lord Agravaine says, interrupting Lord Gaheris, who scowls. There’s a bruise on cheek that Emrys didn’t notice until now. “She won’t be returning for something as  _ mundane _ as the high kingship.”

Whatever that means, it seems to conclude the discussion, which may or may not have involved Emrys’ eventual death. Lord Gareth lowers his knife, and grips him instead by the arm, by the same spot his brother had earlier. “Not a word, boy,” he says through his teeth, and drags Emrys out the main door, down a succession of familiar corridors, and finally thrusts him in a dingy, unlit, drafty room intended for guests’ lower ranking servants. The sound of the key turning in the lock stays hanging in the air for a long while after the footsteps recede.

Beyond the single window, the clouds—bloated and shaded with a charcoal tone—blot the sun so completely that day never truly arrives. He counts the hours only through the bustle he hears in the yard below, where Kinna helps the Ralph’s replacement prepare the horses for the night’s promised storm, and forcibly does not think. No one comes with food. At some point, somehow, he sleeps, and dreams of a young woman with hair as black as Myrddin’s and eyes like summer leaves saying, “Just do what’s right and damn the consequences.”

He wakes to a knock on glass. Blearily, he opens his eyes to the dusty ceiling and the condensation he releases with every breath. The knock comes again. He thinks,  _ I’m going to die and I’m not even twelve. _

Then it comes a third time, a fourth. He shakes his head, sits, and looks to the blackened window just as the fifth white peddle collides with unclear glass.

Within seconds, he has the window open, though it was locked when Lord Gareth pushed him inside. “Myrddin?” He breathes the name into the night, quiet as a private thought.

“I’m here” comes the reply from below, and his friend appears, materialising as though grown right from the newly flurrying snow. Beside him stands Rhiannon, but not his own mare. “I’ve made you footholds in the wall. Be quick.”

Emrys doesn’t consider being afraid of the climb, though he’s cold and tired and the fear from earlier still clings to him, unrelenting. With as much speed as he can manage, he uses Myrddin’s magicked stone ladder to descend from the high room, and jumps the final foot. His knees kock. He knows, rather than sees or hears, that the footholds fade back into the wall behind him, as smooth as ever. Myrddin closes the distance between them, meeting halfway with Rhiannon in tow, and doesn’t begrudge Emrys his hug. It’s a childish attempt to seek comfort, but he can’t find it in himself to care. 

After a moment, Myrddin unwraps his arms from around Emrys, and steps away. To his surprise, he clamours onto Rhiannon’s back. “Come here,” he says, his hand outstretched. “Even bearing two of us, she’ll be faster than mine.”

There’s an inevitable truth in that, since Myrddin’s mare is hardly better than a pony from the Highlands. Emrys accepts his hand, and climbs on in front. Then, without a backwards glance to the Lothian castle, they flee into the night. 

“Your name is Arthur,” Merlin says, soft but cutting clearly through frozen dale’s still air, “and you’re Uther Pendragon’s only son.”

Winter digs her sharp claws into them both, so even after a declaration like that, the best Arthur can do is shake in Merlin’s grip and chatter his teeth. Across the naked ground around them, nocturnal wildlife shrieks and calls, and upon the path below, the mare’s hooves crunch over the dead heath. Between the cold and the silver moonlight sneaking through the clouded shroud, Arthur is absent of any colour, as white as the winter moor. As the silence stretches, Merlin thinks, with grim nausea, that he could be sculpted right from the snow.

Finally, he manages one large, juddering breath, and says, “That’s why they locked me in that room?”

“That’s what I suspect.” And much more than that, Merlin thinks. He knew this night would come from the moment the boy stepped onto the pool’s bank and introduced himself as Emrys. In a less certain way, he knew even before that, from the time those scant few days when his father was dying and he was still in Camelot. By the time the fever took hold, Lot had taken to Uther’s side. It wasn’t difficult; Morgause bound them by marriage, and Gorlois’ demand for Morgana bound them through a shared enemy in court. 

What Merlin hadn’t expected was Ygraine’s death, and the consequences thereafter.

An ill wind sweeps down from the three pikes to the north. The boy’s teeth chatter again, and a shiver runs through his body. Merlin presses him closer with his free arm, as if his own numb body will provide the much needed warmth. Back in Lothian, when awareness of the disaster struck him, it was already sunset. He panicked, and ran without grabbing a cloak.

Now, here on the edge of the Elmet dales, where anyone travelling will see them from a long way off, he doesn’t feel safe using more than a meagre heating spell. It isn’t enough. For him alone perhaps, but not for a malnourished boy of just-about-twelve.

“If I’m the Prince of Briton,” he asks, “how did end up like  _ this? _ ”

“Morgause was your sister,” Merlin says. Arthur goes rigid in his grasp. “Uther was young. Sixteen? Fifteen? Some rumours say that the mother was a priestess of Eostre, others a Saxon chieftain’s wife—he was very good at bedding other men’s wives, before Ygraine. Offering a king like Lot a bastard daughter would normally have been an insult, but men where claiming she was ‘the most beautiful woman in Briton’ when she was only your age. They had Agravaine. Neither Uther nor his brother had a legitimate heir. That was likely reason enough to give him ambition to see his own family take the throne, if Morgause didn’t put it in his head.”

There’s another lull between them before Arthur says, “I still don’t—I’m sorry.”

In truth, Merlin doesn’t fully understand either, but he’s older, so he has to guess based on what he does know. “Uther created powerful enemies when he banned magic,” he says, “and he had enough of those already, real and imagined. So he fostered you with an ally. But there’s no way to check in on you without the risk of giving away your location beyond just knowing a boy of your age was in the household. Lot and Morgause took their feelings for Uther out on you. I’m sorry.”

“How do you know all this? Did you ‘see’ it?”

“No,” Merlin answers, then amends his statement, saying, “Some of it,” before continuing, “I’m Aurelius Ambrosius’ son. Illegitimate. So I’m Uther’s nephew. Your cousin. My real name is Merlin Emrys.”

The next silence to follow is worse than the others, longer and laced with a tension that dances painfully across his skin. Arthur shatters it with a laugh, half-hysterical. “Emrys?” he repeats. “They called me after  _ you? _ ”

He says it like an accusation. Despite himself, Merlin flinches. “Uther never liked me,” he says, and shifts his weight in what little way he can on Rhiannon’s back. “Just another private form of humiliation. If Lot had succeeded in killing you with Uther dying, no one would know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t have Lot suspect you knew anything.”

Arthur sniffles, and wipes across his eyes with the back of one hand. “Now what?” he says as a single heavy grey cloud slots over the sun. “Are you just going to leave me at Camelot and go back to Wales?”

Again, Merlin says, “No.” Rhiannon whinnies, warning them of the next snowfall. “I came to Lothian for you, yes, but also because I began to look too much like my mother. The ‘village’ I told you of is the gwas households that belong to the castle. Uther never knew her. Magic will keep him, or anyone else I wish, from making the other connection.”

“But he’s a king,” Arthur says, though he loses the final word to another bout of trembling when the wind envelops them. “Neither of us are just going to say who you are, or that you can do magic,  _ obviously _ , so he won’t burn you at the stake, but he won’t allow some Welsh peasant to be my tutor. Even I know that.”

“Not a tutor, no,” Merlin says. “Still, I won’t leave you to the mercies of the court. It may take some time, but it’s not a worry for you, Arthur.”

Sullen, Arthur says, “I think I preferred Emrys.”

Merlin sighs, and doesn’t answer. 

When the snowfall begins, he clicks his heels twice against Rhiannon’s sides, encouraging her into a hard gallop that leaves him clinging desperately to her black mane with one hand. With the other, he holds his cousin close. They ride hard through the night and much of the following day, slowing to leave the road when they skirt down the boundary of lower Northumbria and Mercia, which is the best patrolled part of the journey. Arthur shifts in and out of a half-rest, kept awake from the anxious ride, but dragged to sleep by the cold. There’s nothing Merlin can do for it, though it’s just cause for another concern to add to his growing list.

They regain speed when they cross into Scrobbesbyrigscīr, the district that has housed Camelot since his father regained the territory from the Mercians in his first battle. Arthur hasn’t shivered in hours. Merlin’s still awake only through his sheer determination to beat Lot to the city gates.

He barely stops Rhiannon in time to avoid slamming into the knights who guard them, the one on the right ready to signal the gatekeeper to close them for the night. “We need to see the King,” he says as the other goes to demand his business. Beneath him, Rhiannon trembles. “It’s—”

“We can’t just bring a couple of peasants to see the  _ King _ .” The knight is young, hardly Merlin’s age, with small eyes and ruddy skin and one of those aristocratic affects reminiscent of a dying bloodhound. The cloaks they both wear are warmer than anything either Merlin or Arthur have owned in years. “State your—”

“Treason,” he manages through his frozen lips. “King Lot—” He coughs for dramatic effect, but his efforts to gain sympathy pale in comparison to Arthur, who begins sliding from the mare’s back. When Merlin tries to catch him, the boy’s dead weight only drags him along, so they fall together, landing as a tangled mass onto the cobblestone ground.

The other knight, before his companion could speak, kneels to help them. “Penda,” he calls, loud over his shoulder, “stable the horse.” A boy appears within seconds, indistinct through Merlin’s swimming vision, as this reasonable man continues, “Sir Cendric, keep your guard.”

“You believe them?”

“Do they look like they’re lying?”

Though Cendric sputters, he ignores him, asking instead, “Can you walk?”

Merlin’s legs ache from the ride and his head throbs, the pain acute even through the hypothermic inability to feel. When he says that he can, he follows the knight’s orders to leave Arthur, and allows the man to help him to his feet. He stands, hugging tight around his chest, when the knight crouches, undoes his cloak, then wraps Arthur in it before rolling him into his arms. During the ride, Merlin hadn’t actually considered how they would get to Uther. This man’s kindness is simple, unexpected luck.

By the time they reach the castle, the night-time sky is a midnight black, the moon and stars veiled behind yet more clouds. There are few servants about, and fewer knights or advisors. Those left glance their way, clearly curious, but no one stops them. Their footsteps echo. Their breathing is monstrously loud. In the shadowed corners, Merlin hears rats’ claws clatter on the marble floors.

“The King is ill,” the knight says abruptly, as they take a sharp left away from what Merlin remembers as the direction to the throne room. “There’s someone else you can talk to, though. His name is Gaius. He’s the Court Physician, but one of the closest advisors.”

Hope and fear flare as one. After Uther banned magic, Merlin hadn’t expected Gaius, nor any other magic-user at Court, to survive. “Can he help Arthur?”

The knight halts mid-step, so Merlin knocks right into his back. “Arthur?” he says. “Wait—treason—is this—”

“ _ Shh _ .” His mouth snaps shut, and his gaze raises from the boy in his arms to look over his shoulder. Like the other guard, he’s also about Merlin’s age. They’re the same height, though it’s obvious which of them is the better fed. When he swallows, the knot in his throat bobs.

“I haven’t asked your name,” he says.

“Myrddin,” Merlin says. “I was a household servant.”

“I’m Leon,” says the knight, and, shaken, turns again. “It isn’t far.”

It isn’t, which Merlin remembered. In these past twelve years, Gaius hadn’t moved his workshop from the north tower’s tallest room. Arthur doesn’t wake once, even for the ascent. He still has the look of a snow-made child, magicked to life, or dead.

Through the plain wooden door wafts the scents of woodsmoke and crushed herbs, of warmth and health. Sir Leon nudges it open with the toe of his boot, not bothering to knock. “Gaius?” he says as it swings shut behind Merlin, so a man far older than one who exists in his memory startles, banging his hip on his work table, and spins to face them.

He’s a physician, and so it’s Arthur he notes first, because he’s a child, and he unconscious in a knight’s arms. “Put him there, by the fire,” he says, without deference, and with just a nod, Sir Leon does as ordered. There’s a cushioned bench by the hearth blanketed in half a dozen quilts, not too close to the flames but close enough. It hasn’t moved from where it was in Merlin’s childhood, nor have the tables, nor the chairs, nor the ladder leading to the significantly emptier upper bookshelves. All that is identical, drawn directly from the past. 

What’s different is Gaius. Gaius, with a back as stooped as any oat farmer’s, whose hair’s gone grey and his eyes uneven, and who’s grown a goiter on his neck. Wrinkles reshape his face. His hands are swollen at the knuckles. When he turns to finally look Merlin’s way, his bones creak beneath his skin.

Only one eye properly widens. Merlin shakes his head, movement slight, hands tucked in his pockets.  _ Don’t say anything _ , he thinks.  _ Please. _

Thankfully, Gaius’ mouth snaps shut, and turns again to Arthur without a word. “What is this, Leon?” he asks, as familiarly as always. The heat of the room burns through the winter chill, pressing down onto Merlin’s chest. “Who are they?”

“That’s Myrddin,” Sir Leon says, jerking his chin in Merlin’s direction, “a servant in King Lot’s household. This—” He falters. Clears his throat. “This is Prince Arthur.”

Some concoction pops on its burner. “Wake the King,” Gaius says, and releases a long, unsteady breath. “I’ll get the boy conscious shortly and we’ll join you. There’s also a new draft I mean to try. Tell him only that for now.” 

Sir Leon agrees, and leaves at a half-run, letting the door bang shut behind him. Gaius barely allows his footsteps to recede before he focuses his full attention on Merlin and says, “You’re safe here,  _ Myrddin _ . No one will else will come in without knocking. Do what you can.”

That’s all he needs to hear to rush to Arthur’s side, and raise his hands above his body. “ _ H _ _ æten _ ,” he says, pouring out heat and life. It seeps through the boy’s skin, flowing through him, so he wakes, gasping, reaching out without thought to grasp Merlin’s loose shirt. “You’re in Camelot,” he says quickly. “No one will hurt you.”

He surges up, forward, fingers from both hands wrapped into the thin linen with his forehead pressed to Merlin’s chest. Leftover terror and cold wrack his frame, so Merlin tugs him close, and twists to look back at Gaius. “I can help with the draft,” he says. “Have you identified the curse?”

“Myrddin,” Arthur starts, panicked, but Merlin shushes him, and says the man is a friend.

“I was there when it was cast,” Gaius says, and scowls. “Even if I were still allowed to use magic, I don’t know if I would have the power to break this. The witch said, ‘may your body suffer from the blackness of your heart.’ Or something to that effect. It was Cumbric.”

To be able to transfer emotional immorality to physical illness is not simple, but also more manageable than a plant- or animal-based poison, which would require science. Science, while important, isn’t something Merlin understands. “I can help,” he says again. “Please. No one will ever find out that you didn’t make it. Say it was combined essense of goldenrod and nettle or something.”

Though he holds no love for Uther, especially now, Arthur isn’t of age, and his regent really  _ would  _ be Lot —if anyone were to even believe he was the long lost heir without direct verification. Gaius, however unhappily, agrees to accept the help, and moves aside to present his workbench once Merlin manages to free himself of Arthur’s hold. The boy follows him nonetheless, adhered to his side.

“I reckon Uther won’t be told who you are.” Gaius looks at Arthur as he says, but he’s still half-asleep, and doesn’t notice.

“Only my father knew my mother’s name for me,” Merlin says, eyes flickering orange and gold as he infuses the draft with the correct cure. “The official story is that I’m Myrddin, keeper of the woodland chapel outside Lot’s estate and Arthur’s forbidden tutor. The latter is true. Lot soon won’t have the standing to claim the former isn’t.”

“And  _ is  _ there a chapel?”

With a humorless smile, Merlin says, “There is now. It’s ready.”

Arthur, though not as tall as Merlin was at his age, is too big to carry, so the descent is a slow process. For the rest of the trek, he wilts routinely against Merlin’s side. It’s been a long few days, and a long twelve years.

In Uther’s apartment, they find only him, bedridden, and Sir Leon, speaking lowly. When they enter, the knight snaps to attention, falling silent. Though it’s clearly a struggle, the King raises himself with shaking arms, until he falls back hard, supported by the bed’s headboard and its numerous pillows. He, too, has wrinkles he lacked in Merlin’s childhood. They creep around his eyes and mouth. His hair is still dark, but draws back by the temples, so his widow’s peak is more severe than ever. Veins stick out blue and bloated on his arms and neck. His age knocks the air right from Merlin’s lungs.

He also, Merlin thinks, looks nothing like his son.

“You have a cure, Gaius?” Sickness weakens his voice, so the words slur into one.

“Yes, sire,” Gaius answers, and crosses the room to stand at Uther’s side. He pulls the stopper from the vail, where, inside, the cure sloshes thin and silvery. “All in one go if you can manage it.”

Uther does, then promptly coughs himself blue. Arthur yelps in alarm; Sir Leon looks ready to run for the door. For pretense, Merlin imitates their concern, so only Gaius remains calm.

Eventually, the fit subsides. “Leave me,” the King says, waving a shaking hand, head lolling. “I must rest.”

“Sire,” Gaius says, and motions for Arthur and Merlin to come closer. “We can’t. We’re here on urgent business. Sire, this is your son.”

Like that, Uther is alert, eyes bright, searching, so they pass over Sir Leon and Merlin, and fall on Arthur. What life his face regained in wake of the cure vanishes once again. “Ygraine,” he says, in hardly more than a whisper, then catches himself. “Arthur?”

Arthur doesn’t move.

Uther stumbles as he leaves his bed, moving past his physician and knight to fall to his knees before his son. He touches his face, his shoulders. Takes him by the upper arms. When he flinches, Uther stills, then pushes up his shirt’s sleeve.

“Who did this to you?” he says, looking from the bruise and back to Arthur’s face. “Why are you so thin? So  _ cold? _ ”

“I only guessed this was your son, sire,” Merlin says when Arthur tries, and fails, to answer. “I knew him as a servant in King Lot’s household. He ran away yesterday when the King tried to have him killed, and found me.”

“You?” his uncle says, noting the other raggedly dressed man for the first time. “And who are you?”

Merlin repeats the lie he told Gaius, and notes the look Sir Leon sends his way, sharp and curious. “I did what I could for him these last few years,” he says, “but that was only so much. I thought he was a servant, like everyone else.”

“Gather your most trusted men,” Uther says as he rises, his quivering now from rage rather illness. That, Merlin finds familiar: his anger. “Find Lot.” Then, attention turned again to his son, his shoulders slumped, he says more to himself than anyone else, “He called you  _ Emrys. _ ” 

“How do you know?” Arthur asks finally, suddenly, as Sir Leon takes his leave. “That I’m really…” He trails off without finishing the question. 

With terrible, measured slowness, Uther rests a hand atop his son’s head. “You look just like your mother,” he says, and sounds old, and tired, and sad.

Less than a week after Yule, King Lot loses his head for treason. In his final moments, he claims the King’s son is a bastard, same as his brother’s boy, unfit to rule.

Together, in their northern kingdom, his three surviving sons swear their revenge.

Arthur is a ghost haunting Camelot’s halls. 

“Father” he calls Uther, because that’s what Uther said he must do. “Father,” he asks, on the days he speaks at all, “have I done something wrong?” He asks it with his wide eyes turned to look at his father, his posture stiff and the light accenting the sharp angles of his narrow body. Within days, Uther realised he attracted light as his mother had—as if his likeness to her were not uncanny enough.

But not those eyes. They’re blue, but not the same shade as Ygraine’s, nor of his own. Those are Nimueh’s eyes.

Arthur is a living boy, and a mistake. “Father,” he asks, with his sorceress’ eyes, his mother’s face, and his Northumbrian speech, “have I done something wrong?”

“No,” Uther says. “What do you know of—” History. Languages. Swordplay. Riding.  _ Manners. _

A shocking amount, he learns quick enough, with the exception of swordplay. He reads Latin better Uther had at twelve, and more than once, he catches the boy muttering in Welsh under his breath. The mare he and the priest rode in on is a wild one, yet yields to him with ease. He’s too quiet to be impolite. If it weren’t for that horrid northern peasant accent, it would be easy for any outsider to believe he was raised in these walls.

When he moves, he’s silent across the stone floors. In the training field, where Sir Cendric rectifies his gap of knowledge, neither batter nor bruise affect him. It’s rare he speaks to anyone without them speaking to him first, except the priest, who Gaius took on as his apprentice. Between his silence and the learning he logically should lack, he seems as unreal as Uther considered first his mother.

Others notice as well. He hears whispers of “the Queen” and “unnatural.” Two months after the boy returns, Uther catches a scullery making the sign against evil when Arthur walks past, trailing behind the priest like some loyal puppy to chatter about their day. 

The girl loses her position before the sun sets that night. Meanwhile, Uther calls Gaius to his apartments. 

“Could he be a changeling?” he asks, passing between Ygraine’s handpicked chairs, his arms tucked behind his back. “Some cruel trick of Nimueh’s?”

“I don’t believe so, sire,” Gaius says, in the tone he uses when Uther is ill. “I believe the Prince is just a boy who was in a very bad situation, but had the good fortunate to find a friend.”

“This priest—” Uther pauses, and waves a hand. A draft ripples the tapestries on the walls, so the hunted unicorn truly does seem to run. “Your apprentice. He’s to be trusted? Not one of Lot’s men?”

Shaking his head, Gaius says, “A Welshman, sire. From Brycheiniog. He studied in a monastery there, but struck north after the bandit Kannen burned it down. He’s very intelligent.”

Though that explains the Welsh and Latin, Uther remains unsatisfied. “What of the rest of it?” he says, frustration mounting. “Have you seen him bothered once by a knock in the field? And no boy of twelve should be that quiet.”

“Sire,” Gaius says, “have you ever heard a serving boy walk?”

Uther doesn’t pay the servants any mind, except for his own manservant, but no, he thinks. If they were all terribly noisy, he wouldn’t have any choice  _ but  _ to notice them.

Slowly, he sinks into the closest chair, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “That was Morgause’s household,” he says after a long minute. Arthur hadn’t told him that she was no better than Lot; that was the priest, who told him with only Gaius present how she implied the boy was her husband’s bastard. Whatever Uther had or had not imagined for his son, it certainly wasn’t this. “Her own brother.”

Like Arthur, Morgause looks more like her mother. That may or may not be true for their sister. Perhaps this is Uther’s legacy: a string of estranged children, none of whom resemble him.

With sudden, sharp clarity, he wishes Morgana was in his care. He would bargain for her, or kill Gorlois himself if it meant bringing his daughter home. What gave the Duke any right to the Pendragon line with Ygraine dead? Arthur deserves a sister. Uther just wants both his children, safe and under his own protection before the world can corrupt them further.

For now, he keeps this desire locked away. “That priest will be his manservant,” he says, roused from his stupor by the idea. “Arthur’s insistent he doesn’t need one. Maybe the Welshman will stick.” It’s unseemly for a prince to lack staff, even one raised thinking he belonged to that class himself. “Inform him that he’s to wake Arthur promptly at seven tomorrow. By eight he must be with his tutor.” The tutor’s main purpose, for now, is simply to rid the boy of that accent. “The previous manservant will know the rest of his timetable.”

“Very well, sire,” Gaius says, so, with that, Uther dismisses him.

Alone, Uther plots. 

He plots through the remains of winter and the whole of spring, speaking of his plans to no one. Through it all, he talks of defeating foreign raids and, more discreetly, scorching out the traitors in his own Court. Lot’s followers, mostly, but his friends from Cornwall still number few. Morgana must be here soon, safe. If anyone learns who she is, then she will inherit his enemies. That’s happened clear enough already to her ghost of a brother.

Despite Gaius’ reassurance, the thought still catches Uther at times, especially when he sees his son and the manservant maneuvering the halls on silent feet from lesson to lesson.  _ Ygraine _ , he thinks, and,  _ Nimueh. _ The boy is still scrawny. He won’t look his father in the eye.

Before the summer comes, three more servants lose their position, and one knight receives a severe reprimand for muttering aloud what Uther thinks. He hears no more, after that. 

Unbeknownst to him, though, they do continue. Gwen, a scullery maid hired to replace the first victim to the King’s wrath, brings the talk to her father in the Lower Town. “They say he’s a Sǣl child,” she says with undisguised glee. There’s a smudge of grease from the tea’s roast goose on her chin and her hair has long since fallen from its neat bun. In the light of her father’s forge, her smile takes on a life of its own. “That a  _ sorceress  _ abandoned him and now he’s going to become King and lift—”

“Quiet, girl,” her father says, quick and hard. His mouth is just a line, unsmiling. In response, her own fades. “Talk like that loses you more than just a place in the castle.”

Her brows draw in. “But everyone’s saying it.” 

Poking a long-cooled rod in her direction, he says, “I don’t give a damn what ‘everyone else is saying.’ Prince Arthur won’t be nothing more than the Prince to any of us. Get this through that head of yours now, Gwen.”

“Well, he doesn’t sound like a prince,” his daughter says, disregarding the warning with all the flippancy seen in any girl of seventeen years. “Or, at least that’s what George’s been saying. George is his old manservant, see?  _ He _ says the Prince sometimes sounds like one of us, just northern, since that’s where he was living.”

With a shake of his head that dislodges ash and dust from his hair, her father says, “That’s gotta be nonsense. Go down to the market and get us something for tea before they all close shop for the night.”

The promise of food lures her from the house and away from the talk, but she remains contented in her belief that Prince Arthur is a Sǣl child destined to lift the King’s ban. She doesn’t remember much of magic, but she can still recall the light shows the sorcerers held at each Midsummer’s Eve. More than that, it would be nice if not so many people had to die. 

In this thought, Gwen the scullery maid is far from alone. The rumour sweeps Camelot’s Lower Town, then spreads out to the rest of Scrobbesbyrigscīr, the rest of Briton. It touches hundreds and lonely crofts. It reaches the druids hidden away in the Wood. And, eventually, it reaches Morgause. 

Now, it’s too early for her to act, she thinks, alone with her son on the bank of Avalon’s shore. There’s time yet before she must—so she plots, as the sons of Lot plot, as the druids plot, as Uther does, alone in drafty castle rooms. 

Morgana comes to Camelot at the height of summer, brimming with life and grief in equal measure. “You can’t order me to stay if I don’t want to be here,” she tells the High King without fear or remorse. Her back is straight as a pin, and the breeze from the open windows billows her long hair and dress about her body, a black mass of mourning. “And I do  _ not. _ ”

For her defiance, Arthur loves her instantly. For her looks, Merlin can only cock his head, and wonder if he imagines the similarity she shares to his own father.

In response, Uther is all easy acceptance and grace. Morgana, who is only three months shy of her fifteenth year, distrusts his seeming  _ ooze  _ of masculinity. The knights and courtiers watch her, curious. A second child come to the household? And so soon? Some ploy to regain the Southern Kingdoms’ allegiance, clearly. The girl’s father, the Duke Gorlois—he died fighting in the north, which is proof enough that the King must reassess who he considers friends.

Neither Morgana nor Arthur consider this. She is too embroiled in indignation and hurt; he is too enraptured by her. Just two years his senior, she stands half a head taller, bursting with enough confidence to stare down a high king. That expression doesn’t leave her, even when Uther dismisses every courtier and servant, wishing for his broken family to be alone.

Merlin doesn’t crane his neck to peer over his shoulder when he exists the servants’ door, as the courtiers do, but he does squeeze Arthur’s elbow briefly before departure.

When the throne room is empty, Uther beckons his son forward. He places his hands on the boy’s shoulders, the weight of them heavier than Merlin’s, and says, “This is Prince Arthur, my son. Arthur, this is the Lady Morgana.”

Some of the intensity leaves her, but she doesn’t curtesy or speak. 

“You two will be friends,” he continues. He leaves no room for argument. 

From outside floats a songbird’s call, a linnet’s whistle carried in on the sunshine. Arthur can recognise most birds by sight or song, a skilled he learned in Lothian. More than likely, Morgana can’t. When he says, “It’s nice to meet you, M’—My Lady,” he thinks that she looks like more of a princess than he ever will a prince. The shape of her, the sharp contrast of her colouring, her posture and how neatly she clasps her hands at her front, her long lashes. For it all, she could be a dream of the Roman Venus stepped into the waking world.

That only makes his near slip up all the more mortifying. Inevitably, Uther’s grip tightens as he vows, privately, to have a word with his son’s tutor.

“Just Morgana, please,” she says, allowing the challenge to drain from her entirely, replaced instead with a reassurance that would make Merlin proud. Then, with a wide smile that doesn’t match her mourning gown, she adds, “May I call you Arthur?”

“Yes,” the boy says quickly, and doesn't add what he wishes he could:  _ I prefer Emrys _ . He can never be Emrys again. 

When she gives Uther a fleeting glance, asking his permission, he nods, the movement slight. She calculated the situation correctly, and from then on, the two are friends.

Within hours, someone assigns the long-time servant Gwen, the blacksmith’s daughter, as Morgana’s handmaiden. As she came with a royal bearing Arthur lacked, her day-to-day schedule is far less crowded, so she spends the first few weeks whiling away in her misery, speaking little to anyone, before boredom gets the best of her. It’s late the first time she sneaks from her bed—too late for servants or a heavy guard—and down the winding halls to Arthur’s rooms.

He opens at the first knock, clearly still awake. “Morgana?” he says, brows raised, voice low. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought we should speak alone for once,” she says. “May I come in?”

There’s no hesitation when he opens his door wider and allows her past before shutting it firmly again. “Is something wrong?”

Shaking her head, she says, “Oh, no,” and blows out her single candle as she claims a seat at the edge of his bed. His room is nothing as she expected. For one, it’s only  _ one  _ room, even if it is large, rather than a full apartment. For another, it’s only scantily furnished, and hardly decorated; a table big enough for four stands between the single wardrobe and door, surrounded by the appropriate number of comfortable chairs, the tapestries and bed’s canopy are more practical than princely, and he has no additional seating for guests to lounge. Nothing swings in front of the servants’ door to hide it from view. She wonders if Uther knows, and wonders if he would care even if he did. 

Again, he doesn’t hesitate before taking a seat beside her. “Are you lonely?” he asks, without any attempt at tact. 

“Yes,” she says, and, just as bluntly, adds, “Are you really a changeling?”

He opens his mouth, then snaps it shut again, and feels the flush bloom across his cheeks. “No,” he says finally. “I’m really just Arthur. Or that’s what my father and Myrddin say.”

“Myrddin?”

“My friend.” Manservant now, technically. Though Merlin accepted the position without any sign of resentment, Arthur remains uncomfortable with the idea.  _ He’s _ a prince too, and, more than that, a very powerful sorcerer.

“You don’t sound very certain about it.” She tilts her head, inspecting his narrow face and the way he seemed to draw the torchlight. Uncomfortably, he shifts, and lowers his gaze to his lap. “No, you’re not a changeling,” she says, pleased. “Changelings are supposed to be ugly. You’re not ugly, just skinny. I bet I can beat you in a fight.”

“A—what?”

“A fight,” she repeats. “My father taught me swordplay. I’m done being sad, so I’m going to tell Uther that I plan to continue that here.”

Frowning, Arthur says, “He doesn’t like it being...told things. It would be better to ask. And say please a lot.”

She scoffs. “I’m his ward,” she says. “I should be able to keep my old pastimes. What, afraid I’ll beat you?”

“No,” he says, and scrunches his nose. “It wouldn’t be hard. Sir Cendric just likes knocking me about. He doesn’t really teach me. He’s worse at teaching than Master Ealdwine.”

“Who’s Master Ealdwine?”

“My tutor. He never  _ really _ tries showing me how to get rid of how I talk.” For the first time, it occurs to him that maybe Ealdwine thinks him a changeling too. “Myrddin tries, but he’s too Welsh. That’s why I still sound like some northerner.” 

With another bright smile, Morgana says, “Well, I can help you. Every noble sounds the same, even in Cornwall.”

_ You don’t look Cornish _ , he nearly says, but bites it back. Likely, that isn’t true. All he knows of what the Cornish are  _ meant  _ to look like comes from Lady Morgause, and she’s not much of a source.

They call it a deal, and shake hands, because Arthur insists it’s how two people seal an agreement (which Morgana, to her secret thrill, realises must be a peasant tradition). “Can I visit you again?” she asks when they part. “You can also visit me.”

“Of course,” he says, and truly grins for the first time. It transforms his face as the air of mild terror melts away. “My father  _ did _ say we’re supposed to be each other’s friends now.”

Later, she returns unseen to her room, tired but not quite so sad. After she goes, Arthur extinguishes the torch hanging beside the window. They curl under their separate blankets in their separate rooms and soon surrender themselves to sleep.

One year passes, then two, without sign of impending doom or looming destiny. Arthur becomes a model prince; Morgana rejects every suitor Uther turns her way. Both are too kind to servants, but especially their servants, who too become fast friends. Meanwhile, Briton experiences an lull of unexpected and vastly appreciated peace.

Then comes the winter of Arthur’s fifteenth year. Then comes Morgana’s nightmares, and Uther’s mistake.

The four stand not at Uther’s side, but peering out from the window of a second floor corridor. “He was just a healer,” Arthur’s saying over his father’s decree, low and anxious, worried that someone might hear. What accent he had when he arrived is undetectable. “He wasn’t hurting anyone.”

“It’s murder,” Morgana says, and leans against the window pane, arms folded across her chest. “Something will happen because of it. I just—I know it.”

Behind their backs, Gwen and Merlin share a pointed glance. Though she doesn’t know about  _ his _ magic, she came to him already, babbling her fears about Morgana until he quieted her. “Isn’t his own daughter supposed to be a witch?” she asked, hysterics creeping at the edge of each word. “It doesn’t matter or not how much of a liking the King’s got for her. He’ll  _ kill _ her.”

Even after she quieted, she wasn’t calm. Merlin couldn’t tell her she was wrong.

Now Morgana breathes, in and out, her focus entirely captured by the scene unfolding beneath them. In the weak winter sunlight, her pale skin’s taken on a sickly pallor. “Arthur,” she starts, but stops when King Uther calls, “I pride myself as a fair and just king, but for the crime of sorcery, there is only one sentence I can pass.”

When Thomas Collins’s head rows, the crowd jeers. Morgan's hand lashes out, finding Arthur's as she turns away from the sight, but he keeps his gaze on the scene below, tension heavy on his shoulders and mouth in a line. 

Again, the servants exchange a look behind their charges' backs, worried and powerless. 

“We can go now,” Merlin says quietly, without any pretense of formality, and reaches to lead Arthur to shelter from his father's cruelty. 

Hand still raised, just halfway to its destination, he freezes, because a woman's shriek carries on the wind from below. Morgana's head snaps back up at the sound; Gwen jolts forward; Arthur tightens his grip; abruptly, Merlin's heart forgets to beat. All at once, it jumps, resuming its task double time, because following the cry comes a curse: “The only evil here is yours,” the dead man's mother proclaims, her plain Briton buoyant on Camelot's mounting terror. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. A son for a son.”

Too late, Uther orders her arrest. With a burst of poisoned smoke, she disappears, heedless of the bystanders around her. Her son's eyes stare at the space she occupied moments before, seeing nothing. The crowd's lift in unison, finding not the High King on his balcony, but his son half hidden in the window. In the pale sunlight sneaking past the pane, he seems to glow with a golden light. 

Morgana tugs him away, back into the shadows, because though Merlin wants to, a servant cannot touch his master in front of so many prying eyes. The second they're out of view, he has his hands on the boy's arms, holding him with the steadiness of an elder brother. 

“Nothing will happen to you,” he says, too determined for Arthur to believe otherwise. “I won't let it. I promise.”

“How can you promise that?” Morgana asks before Arthur can speak. Though Gwen seems about to say something as well, she keeps her silence, for she maintains her distance as a maidservant more firmly than Myrddin ever will a manservant. 

“If Myrddin says it, then it's true.” It's the closest Arthur's come to snapping at Morgana since they met. Embarrassed, guilty, he means to apologise, but loses his opportunity when the sound of footsteps reaches them from around the corner.

Merlin releases him and steps back two paces just as the High King comes into view. His heart still hasn’t calmed. 

“Go,” he says, waving his hand to both the servants with a single glance at either. There's no guilt etched into the lines of his aging face, nor anxiety weighing on his spine. That stress he leaves to his son and ward.

Obediently, they exit, walking side by side. When they're past earshot, Gwen says, in hardly even a whisper, “Do you think she, you know?” and, to her dread, Myrddin simply nods. 

A day later, the dead man's mother attempts to assassinate Arthur, though he's innocent of his father's crimes, and survives because of Merlin's magic. The following morning, he finds the boy and Lady Morgana side by side on his bed, blissfully asleep, curled together like children, or husband and wife. 


End file.
